The U.S. House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties will be holding a hearing this Thursday on "Lessons Learned from the 2004 Presidential Election."

Though no press release has yet been sent out by the Committee, and the link to the hearing's page at the Judiciary website is currently broken, The BRAD BLOG has both good news and bad news to report here.

The good news: Ohio's former Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been invited to testify and has confirmed that he will actually show up this time, according to several Judiciary sources. Blackwell had previously snubbed the committee's earlier invitation to testify back in February about the myriad crimes that were committed on and by his watch in the 2004 Presidential Election.

Following his last refusal to appear --- when he responded to the committee claiming "my schedule will not permit me to attend the hearings" --- Judiciary Committee spokesperson Jonathon Godfrey hinted that a subpoena might be forthcoming if Blackwell continued to refuse to appear. This time, at least as of today, it looks like he's coming, according to confirmation by Godfrey this afternoon. Thus guaranteeing what should be a very lively hearing.

More good news: Shameless GOP "voter fraud" zealot and disgraced former FEC chair Hans Von Spakovsky will also be appearing. By invitation of the Republicans on the committee, amusingly enough. What were they thinking in inviting this embarrassment? Beats us, but we're happy to hear he'll be back on the Congressional hot seat. Thanks Repubs!

And then there's the bad news...

The rest of the witness list has some enormous holes in it, particularly when it comes to the issues that will be of greatest concern this November. Moreover, sources tell The BRAD BLOG that, given a busy legislative schedule, this may well be the final hearing on elections in the committee prior to November.

Matthew Segal, Executive Director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE), told The BRAD BLOG this afternoon that he was disappointed that nobody seemed to be invited to this perhaps final hearing prior to the '08 election to speak on either e-voting or youth voting issues.

"There is no one on electronic voting, no one on student voter access, and, basically, no one from any groups or organizations that really represent any grass roots constituencies," he told us in a phone call today.

Rounding out the witness list will be election law and voting rights professor Daniel Tokaji of Ohio State's Moritz College of Law and the Baltimore School of Law's Gilda Daniels, formerly an attorney at both the DoJ's Civil Rights Division, Voting Section, and at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Both were invited by the Democrats on the committee.

In addition to von Spakovsky, the Republicans have scheduled campaign finance and lobbying attorney, GOP "strategist" Cleta Mitchell (watch her get spanked madly by our friend Cliff Schecter during an appearance on MSBNC just prior to the 2006 election, wherein Mitchell attempted to downplay the myriad GOP scandals, such as Mark Foley's, as little more than "politically motivated").

Sadly, as Segal noted, there will be nobody to discuss the fact that it's strictly impossible to know if any vote ever cast on a touch-screen (DRE) voting machine --- in the past or in the future --- has been recorded accurately, as per the voter's intent. There will be nobody to discuss the fact that even paper ballots, counted by electronic systems, cannot be presumed to have been accurately tabulated, since optical-scan systems are prone to failure, easily hacked, and almost never verified as actually able to count ballots as they were cast.

Moreover, despite thousands, even millions, of students in Ohio and elsewhere being tossed off of voting rolls, denied the right to vote where they go to school, and required to wait in line until 2 am to cast a vote back in 2004 --- as Segal can testify firsthand, based on his experience at Kenyon College in Ohio in '04 --- there will again be nobody to represent the concerns about the Youth Vote, even in a year when student turnout will be so critical to Democrats.

Finally, if, in fact, this proves to be the last election-related hearing in Judiciary prior to November, that means the GOP/White House/Rove top-dog, go-to voter suppression/vote-caging attorney/snake-oil salesman Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, will never have been held accountable for his years of "voter fraud" propaganda since 2004 --- despite the mountains of material we've reported on him for the past four years --- nor will he have to answer to exactly who supplied the nearly $1 million he received to run his "non-partisan," tax-exempt, American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) anti-democracy scam.

You can tell the fix is in on the presidential race. They are saying that McCain is just about even with Obama.

There is no way in h... that the republicans are going to let a democrat win this election.

Just look at McCain when he is giving a speech. Pay attention to was he is saying an it sounds like a group of words thrown together trying to tell you don't vote for Obama.

How does his war record give him any accountablity for the presidency of our country. If you check his record (which the news media will never do) it shows flip/flopping and changing of what he says over the years.

McCain is doing the same thing which Bush has done. He take his corruptions and mis-quotes and changes the meaning of what he had previous said ,,, saying that was not what he said.

We are reaching into a deep dark hole if we reach down to McCain.

The man just doesn't have it and it shows when he is asked a question he had not prepared for,, or the person he calls on was the wrong person with the wrong question for him to answer.

Thanks to HAVA, elections are vulnerable to multiple vote miscounts: at the precinct level with closed-source, diverse, proprietary code-based touch screens (DREs) and Optical scanners and then on closed-source, proprietary Central Tabulators. They have you coming and going.

On the other hand, paper ballots can easily be input to a standard personal computer spreadsheet. Voters can request a copy before leaving the precinct. The precinct (spreadsheet) file is uploaded to the Internet. The voter can quickly and easily verify his vote as the spreadsheet ballot records are sorted by a unique Precinct/Ballot ID code. At the same time, he can view and/or download the total precinct ballots to verify the vote counts. Consolidation of district/county/state vote counts is tabulated by Open Source software.

Three (3) volunteers input and verify the paper ballots. As Volunteer A reads the ballot, B enters the data and C verifies the result. Data entry would be completed shortly after the polls closed. The voter fills out a ballot marking each selected candidate's code (i.e. a=Dem, b=Rep, c=Ind). The volunteers use their god-given optical scanners (EYES) to read the ballots and enter the codes in a spreadsheet. As each code is entered, the spreadsheet automatically calculates the total vote and percentage for each candidate.

And, since McCain is the candidate from organized crime, there is absolutely NO chicanery off the table! Remember back when Nixon tried to appoint Carswell to the SCOTUS? Someone noted that as a political thinker Carswell was mediocre - and Senator Eastland said that he thought that mediocrity deserved representation on the Court. In the same vein, since so many of our citizens are criminals, what's weong with having a representative of the Lansky-Bronfman Syndicate running for President?

Republican office holders have been cleared by the party to do whatever it takes to get reelected, regardless of past party line positions. Crossing the aisle might be the first little crack in party discipline. The lying, cheating and stealing will go on. It's the spots. You know, the leopard.

Almost 8 years later, still nothing has been, or will be done about stealing elections... Voting Machines, polls and counts are rigged, just as they were in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and now 2008.

They aren't even afraid of the seats, or are they afraid that a Democrat will be President, cause, key states are already rigged, they have gotten away with EVERYTHING they have done, and will never be held accountable for doing so!

I believe the non-issue that e-voting has become is deliberately to throw us off-track and think that the hearing actually amounts to something.

Why the democrats aren't examining this is beyond me. I can only speculate:

A) They have been brainwashed into thinking it's a non-issue.

B) They are afraid that to bring it up is political suicide; besides, they may figure that either the hackers don't care about their particular race, or that if they do speak out against electronic voting, the hackers will make sure they lose.

C) They have made an actual or implied deal: They'll leave e-voting alone and they might get some bills passed that they want without the attack machine coming after them.

D) What are we all worried about e-voting for? It's a non-issue! (just KIDDING)

In their replies to the OP, some DUers use classic diversionary tactics to change the subject - or have no clue to what the OP is all about. They criticize the use of Excel and ignore the fraud that has and will occur with ALL types of voting machines. By avoiding the central argument by trying to create an Excel straw man, they reveal both a desire to maintain the status quo as well as a limited knowledge of programming in general and Excel in particular.

In response to a challenge to corrupt the spreadsheet, a DUer said: "No thanks". Does that mean he won't even try or that that he tried without success?

Criticisms of the OP are reminiscent of those leveled at Lotus 1-2-3 and PCs in the early eighties when corporate gatekeepers feared that mainframes were being made obsolete by the new machines. They called them toys. Some toys.

The author of the OP has had over 30 years experience in quantitative application program design and development- from defense/aerospace IBM mainframes to Wall Street PCs. He converted main frame applications for investment banks on Wall Street from FORTRAN to Lotus 1-2-3 in the early eighties and then to Excel in the mid-nineties. He developed and marketed spreadsheet based corporate financial models to some of the largest U.S. consumer product manufacturers and foreign banks. As a programming consultant, he developed Excel VBA applications for dozens of the world's largest international banking institutions and corporations. He knows very well what Excel is capable of.

Naysayers miss (or ignore) the essence of the OP: The problem is that current HAVA-compliant systems are insecure, lack data redundancy, are not open source, subject to program "patching" and remote hacking. And of course, designed by GOP-friendly manufacturers who control the tabulation (see Ohio 2004).

These issues are addressed in the OP by illustrating how data redundancy checks can provide a full audit of the count; individuals retain a copy of their paper ballot. Any voter can check that his vote was accurately recorded by comparing his paper ballot copy to his uniquely coded ballot record in the precinct file which was uploaded to the Internet. And election officials at the precinct, county and state levels can fully audit the vote totals.

It suggests an OPEN SOURCE system designed by professionals for use in all state precincts - not a set of individual spreadsheets written by non-professionals for each precinct. A robust, open source VBA-Excel driven application could be developed in a matter of weeks.

It is patently false to claim that spreadsheets are not up to the task due to security issues and that a database system is the only feasible programming solution. Diebold has used PC database software- Microsoft Access. How did that go?

Spreadsheets are just one vehicle for input and transmission of voting data from the precinct to the Internet. Critics need to show why the Access database used by Diebold is more secure than Excel. The sample spreadsheet took all of 20 minutes to write and proved that counting votes is not rocket science.

Have critics ever written a commercial Excel-based application? One can only assume from the comments that they haven't. Then why don’t they create an equivalent program using their favorite database? That should be a piece of cake for them.